Obama, race and class

For all his talk of standing on the shoulders of giants, Obama has had an uneasy relationship with previous generations of black leaders, including Jackson, preferring to fashion his own message. No aide was more instrumental in honing that message than David Axelrod, a veteran Democratic consultant with a knack for blending racial and economic messages.

As an adviser to mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer in 2001, Axelrod helped craft the “Two New Yorks” message which contrasted the economic success of Wall Street millionaires with less well-to-do outer borough residents. This year, Bill de Blasio — who is being advised by Axelrod protégé John Del Cecato — has soared to the top of Democratic mayoral polls by hammering away at the gap between rich and poor and the increasing shortage of housing for the city’s squeezed middle class.

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“Jesse Jackson had a pretty good line back when he was running for president in the ’80s … It was something like, “When the factory lights go out we are all the same color in the dark,’” said Axelrod, who began his career helping Harold Washington become Chicago’s first black mayor.

“Look, talking about race and class both have their challenges,” he adds. “If you have a discussion about [class] they accuse you of trying to divide rich and poor and race, you now, has always been a difficult conversation. But for Obama, talking about these [economic] disparities, which are obviously worse among blacks and Latinos, this wasn’t a strategic thing. We didn’t set out to talk about race in an oblique way … He believes this is the central issue of our time, a fundamental unifying issue.”

Still, Obama is becoming more willing to discuss issues of race in a more personal way now that he’s liberated from having to run for office again.

People around the president say he has never really shied away from talking about his race — and cite his 2008 speech in Philadelphia in which he spoke frankly about the subtle racism he witnessed throughout his life, including his own grandmother’s cross-the-street reaction to encountering young black men in public. But critics point out that he never would have addressed the issue head-on before the firestorm over his one-time pastor Jeremiah Wright threatened to upend his campaign.

The absence of a similar political imperative is what made Obama’s response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin killing all the more striking.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama told White House reporters in late July. “There are very few African-American men in this country who have not had the experience of being followed when they are shopping at a department store. That includes me … There are probably very few African-American men who have not had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator.”

If White House aides viewed his response as liberating, the backlash against his remarks served as a reminder that the issue remains a third rail. Conservative commentators criticized Obama for race baiting and Fox News has rebuked the president for not addressing the recent thrill-kill murder of a white Australian student in Oklahoma by three suspects, two of them black.

“I think it would be a nice gesture for him to do that, particularly since the country of Australia has expressed their sentiments as to the murder itself,” Oklahoma Republican Gov. Mary Fallin told “Fox News Sunday” last weekend.

King didn’t live long enough to witness the age of partisan cable. He came of age in the McCarthy-J. Edgar Hoover era when civil rights leaders — including King himself — were widely suspected of harboring communist sympathies.

For that reason, King dealt with issues of class and economic equality gingerly at the start of his career.

That was changing as he delivered his speech 50 years ago. “I Have a Dream” is a race speech — but King did allude to a broader movement to address economic inequality in the nation’s cities, telling the audience at the Lincoln Memorial, “Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity for all of God’s children … We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”

King didn’t embrace economic inequality as a central theme until the summer of 1967, when he began organizing a multiracial Poor People’s Campaign, an unsuccessful effort to prod the Johnson administration to pass a national economic bill of rights; He was murdered a year later supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

Yet even at the end of his life, King — unlike Obama — viewed his struggle as fundamentally racial, according to his biographer Taylor Branch.

“Race was and is the real third rail,” he said. “Race had been at the heart of our worst compromises as a country from the Revolution to the Civil War on down … It’s the gateway to everything else.”